Improvisation: the Original Survival Tool

When it came down to it, mother nature laid the smackdown on early Homo Sapiens. We arrive in the archeological record about 200,000 years ago. About 90,000 years ago, Africa’s climate became extremely arid in a very short time leading to a resource crisis. No food and no water means no surviving for many of the early Homo Sapiens. If you look at our genetic diversity, it tells the story. What this means is that contemporary Homo Sapiens, us, lack the kind of diversity seen prior to 70 to 90,000 years before the present.

How does the saying go? Hard Times bring a family together. Looking at the fossil record, along with the inferences of genetic evidence in our own DNA, suggests that we nearly didn’t make it. The estimate is that we dwindled to between 1,000 -10,000 individuals capable of reproducing, which created a genetic bottleneck. That’s smaller than most suburbs (heck, a neighborhood), and that is how many people survived to produce the 7 billion and rising on the planet today. Quite a comeback, I would say. The thing is that because there are so many people, it’s impossible to care about all of them. Because of the limits of our own abilities to connect meaningfully with more than about 150 people at any one time, we have no attachment to the hoards of others that blanket the planet despite attempts to connect us through media. We respond to tragic events when they happen because our brains’ mirror neuron systems allow us to feel their discomfort on some level. For most of us, once the check or cash is sent those feelings often dissipate, and we return to business as usual. These understandings would have been critical to people trying to survive. If your group doesn’t function well in times of scarcity and difficulty, it can tear apart the social fabric and lead to serious, sometimes fatal, consequences.

We have developed into beings whose state is situated in the median range of the immediate. We have developed to have the sensibilities of an improviser. What is in front of me? How can I build with this or on it or use it? How do these things or people connect, and what happens when they do? What are my companions feeling? How can I improve or change these relationships? The reason we have this legacy of improvisational sensibility is that these thoughts and behaviors were, more than likely, what led to the survival of those desperate 1,000-10,000 survivors who made it through that 20,000 year stretch of hard times to emerge from Africa to populate a world whose climate was returning to a time of abundance and seasonality. That’s the way selection works. It could have also been that we require less calories to live than the Neanderthal. Seems oxymoronic considering where we are now.

These folks didn’t survive because they were screwing each other over and hoarding resources to the ‘deserving’ few in their tribe. Quite the contrary, most foragers operating from a preconquest consciousness have an egalitarian ethos that puts the individual as subservient to the group; leaders are appointed and impeached by the group, as necessary. Couple this with the fact that we have cognitive mechanisms that intellectually and emotionally reward us for intensive organized collaboration, cooperation and creative exploration (communitas, absolute unitary experience, group flow, whatever you want to call it), and we’ve found some very compelling evidence to suggest that the ethos of support and generosity that is native to improvisation is at the core of our beings. Improvisers are trained specifically to look out for and support their partners and group in order to find success as a whole. Hoarding and self-aggrandizement are things that come out of agriculture, urbanism and consumerism. I think Jared Diamond has covered that subject pretty well. His explorations of the collapse of the Anasazi, Romans and Aztecs in his book Collapse help to clarify the outcomes of the self-centerdness and hierarchy that are the tendency of “civilization”.

The most common form of organized collaborative cooperative creative exploration across the globe is ritual, and a lot of things can fall into that category (music, theater, sports, even some games). Rituals often combine elements like music, dance, myth, and physical challenges in a communal setting. Is it any wonder then, when we look back at the things we find in ancient Homo Sapien sites on the coasts of Africa dated to around 70,000 years ago, that we find the first evidence of red ochre being harvested and stored? Red ochre is the most ancient form of symbolic adornment. To symbol, to create something outside of ourselves that communicates meaning, had almost never been seen in the archeological record until these sites. Throughout the archeological record, red ochre is commonly related to ritual and other symbolic behaviors. Considering that we are descended from these survivors, it is not surprising to see that ritualistic activities are one of the most common features of human society.

We, as a species, are in the business of creating occasions for these sorts of collaborative and sometimes ecstatic events. Our brains are geared to overload when we earnestly undertake these collaborations and provide us with a sublime and indescribable sense of unity and connection with each other and the world at large. What a wonderful adaptation for dealing with tremendous difficulty and adversity? The only other thing that can do this on a more common and less formalized scale is humor. This unifying state is also an amazing way for our brains to be networked, and find innovative solutions to the problems of the world at large.

So it stands to reason that improvisation is a secular road to our social and cultural health as beings on this planet. It also stands to reason that the tools of improvised theater help us find not only depth and detail in life and relationships, but they also help us find humor. Improvisation helps us exercise our brains’ mirror neuron systems, which are appearing to be integral to communication, learning and understanding. The training people receive while studying improvisation is focused on understanding human relationships; both what makes them succeed and what makes them fail. Improvised theater is igniting a sort of grass roots social rebooting. It has the power to awaken people to the present.

The challenges that are emerging in the 21st century will demand more than we’ve had to give in a long time as a species. The last big shift in global climate, the end of the ice age, led to the disappearance of all other hominid species; making us the lone hominids. Even though huge climatic shift events are what have led to great leaps in human brain evolution, it was because we were in a desperate fight to survive, and only those who figured out how to work together and enjoy it made it out alive. Certainly, there was inter-group competition for resources, but it was definitely rarer than the intra-group collaboration, cooperation and creativity that were employed in the daily struggle to survive. These are the very skills that are lacking in the upcoming generation of technologically-dependent and increasingly socially-inept children in the developed world. We are breeding a generation of social illiterates whose narcissism could lead to a dangerous turning point in human history. A point in history where we’ve gone so far away from genuinely connecting with each other and the planet that sustains us, that it becomes the final chapter in humanities book.

After all, Neanderthals were only on the planet for 300,000 years. We’ve only been here for a little over 200,000. If there’s one thing all species have in common, its extinction. To succeed in improvisation and evolution, one must accept and adapt to the new conditions. To deny the changes we observe is to invite being edited out of the scene and out of history. What kind of epitaph will our species have if that happens: Here lies Homo Sapien, the species who ‘blocked’ and ‘denied’ into oblivion?

Great post! Daily, hourly sometimes I see parents who are in an ‘academic panic.’ You know who I mean, those who cart their little darlings from pillar to post every day in the pursuit of ‘experiences’ or who are over the moon when their child can achieve academically at a young age. Yet, if those children are going to drive into a lamp-post at 17 because they’ve never made a decision of their own before they get behind the wheel, or commit suicide at 21 because their first real relationship has broken down – what’s the point? If we have no society to speak of in 30 years…what’s the point?
I think we (I’m a New Zealander, so I mean westerners) have missed the importance of play in children’s development. (Real play without adults or electronics.) Play is fundamental to the genetic programming we have to problem solve and improvise. How much damage is being done from the limited amount of play there is in so many children’s lives…

Thanks Bo! Good to hear from you. I’m glad you got something out of this piece. Was there a part in particular that stood out? I’m always curious to hear what people take away from this. I hope everything is going well in Denmark. Cheers!

Hi Brad
I liked that you stressed that improvised cooperation and our egalitarian ethos probably helped us survive as species. It inspired me in my writingproces where I wanted to draw a line back in history. I´m really busy writing right now I have to delivere my 200+ pages script monday to my publisher. My book is about improvisation in worklife and is called “Indana Jones of the office”, because want to stress the adventures you can get if you dare to improvise.
I hope I can come to Baltimore this summer, but I´m also going to the world congress on psoitive spychology in Philidelphia in July, so I might not have time and money for both. I hope you are doing fine to. Will you go to Baltimore?

Not sure about Baltimore. It all depends on how much work I get between now and then. I’m supposed to be going to Vienna in June to perform and teach, and I’m performing a wedding for friends in New York State in July. Baltimore may not work this year, but there’s talk about 2012 being on the West Coast. I may just wait for that one. Congrats on the book, Bo! That’s great news.